11 September 2025
Leading from the Fog: How to Make Decisions When You Can’t See the Path
The fog is not the exception. It is the operating condition.
Every leader I admire has a version of the same story. There was a moment—a quarter, a crisis, a transition—where they had to make a significant decision without enough information. Where the data was incomplete, the advice was contradictory, and the stakes were real.
Most leadership content treats this as a problem to be solved. Get better data. Build a better model. Hire a better consultant. But after two decades of working with leaders in some of the most uncertain environments on earth—from peace negotiations in East Africa to corporate transformations in New York—I have come to believe that the fog is not the exception. It is the operating condition.
And the leaders who thrive are not the ones who eliminate uncertainty. They are the ones who have learned to lead inside it.
Why We Get Stuck
The most common leadership failure I see is not making the wrong decision. It is making no decision at all. Leaders freeze because they conflate uncertainty with risk. They assume that if they wait long enough, clarity will arrive. But in most complex situations, clarity does not arrive on its own. It emerges from action.
I see this pattern in organisations of every size. The executive team commissions another analysis. The board requests more scenarios. The strategy offsite produces a beautiful deck that nobody acts on. Meanwhile, the organisation drifts—and drift, in a changing environment, is its own kind of decision.
“The most common leadership failure I see is not making the wrong decision. It is making no decision at all.”
What Leading from the Fog Actually Looks Like
Name the uncertainty honestly. The first thing I teach leaders is to stop pretending they know more than they do. Your team can handle ambiguity far better than they can handle being managed around it. When you say, “Here is what we know, here is what we don’t, and here is how we are going to move forward anyway,” you create trust and psychological safety in a single sentence.
Identify the few things you can control and move on those immediately. In every foggy situation, there are a handful of actions that make sense regardless of how the uncertainty resolves. Find those and execute on them. This creates momentum and gives your team a sense of agency—which is the antidote to paralysis.
Set decision points, not deadlines. Instead of saying “We’ll decide by Q3,” say “We’ll decide when we see X, Y, or Z.” This keeps the organisation alert to signals without creating arbitrary pressure.
Stay obsessively close to your people. Change does not fail because of strategy. It fails because leaders retreat to the boardroom when they should be in the room. In every uncertain period I have navigated—in conflict zones and in corporate transformations alike—the leaders who succeeded were the ones who stayed visible, accessible, and honest.
The Fog Is Not Your Enemy
We are living in an era where disruption is not an event but a permanent condition. Supply chains restructure. Markets pivot. Technologies arrive that rewrite the rules of entire industries in a single quarter. The leaders who are waiting for the fog to clear will be waiting forever.
The leaders who will define the next decade are the ones who have made peace with uncertainty. Who have built teams that can navigate without a map. Who understand that the most important leadership skill in the twenty-first century is not prediction—it is the ability to act with integrity and intelligence when you cannot predict.
That is leading from the fog. And it is, I believe, the most important work a leader can learn to do.
“The leaders who will define the next decade are the ones who have made peace with uncertainty.”
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11 September 2025
Leading from the Fog: How to Make Decisions When You Can’t See the Path
The fog is not the exception. It is the operating condition.
Every leader I admire has a version of the same story. There was a moment—a quarter, a crisis, a transition—where they had to make a significant decision without enough information. Where the data was incomplete, the advice was contradictory, and the stakes were real.
Most leadership content treats this as a problem to be solved. Get better data. Build a better model. Hire a better consultant. But after two decades of working with leaders in some of the most uncertain environments on earth—from peace negotiations in East Africa to corporate transformations in New York—I have come to believe that the fog is not the exception. It is the operating condition.
And the leaders who thrive are not the ones who eliminate uncertainty. They are the ones who have learned to lead inside it.
Why We Get Stuck
The most common leadership failure I see is not making the wrong decision. It is making no decision at all. Leaders freeze because they conflate uncertainty with risk. They assume that if they wait long enough, clarity will arrive. But in most complex situations, clarity does not arrive on its own. It emerges from action.
I see this pattern in organisations of every size. The executive team commissions another analysis. The board requests more scenarios. The strategy offsite produces a beautiful deck that nobody acts on. Meanwhile, the organisation drifts—and drift, in a changing environment, is its own kind of decision.
What Leading from the Fog Actually Looks Like
Name the uncertainty honestly. The first thing I teach leaders is to stop pretending they know more than they do. Your team can handle ambiguity far better than they can handle being managed around it. When you say, “Here is what we know, here is what we don’t, and here is how we are going to move forward anyway,” you create trust and psychological safety in a single sentence.
Identify the few things you can control and move on those immediately. In every foggy situation, there are a handful of actions that make sense regardless of how the uncertainty resolves. Find those and execute on them. This creates momentum and gives your team a sense of agency—which is the antidote to paralysis.
Set decision points, not deadlines. Instead of saying “We’ll decide by Q3,” say “We’ll decide when we see X, Y, or Z.” This keeps the organisation alert to signals without creating arbitrary pressure.
Stay obsessively close to your people. Change does not fail because of strategy. It fails because leaders retreat to the boardroom when they should be in the room. In every uncertain period I have navigated—in conflict zones and in corporate transformations alike—the leaders who succeeded were the ones who stayed visible, accessible, and honest.
The Fog Is Not Your Enemy
We are living in an era where disruption is not an event but a permanent condition. Supply chains restructure. Markets pivot. Technologies arrive that rewrite the rules of entire industries in a single quarter. The leaders who are waiting for the fog to clear will be waiting forever.
The leaders who will define the next decade are the ones who have made peace with uncertainty. Who have built teams that can navigate without a map. Who understand that the most important leadership skill in the twenty-first century is not prediction—it is the ability to act with integrity and intelligence when you cannot predict.
That is leading from the fog. And it is, I believe, the most important work a leader can learn to do.
Explore more leadership resources →
Ready to transform your leadership? Learn about the Lab →
← Back to Commentary